I haven’t been really keeping up with this RHEL drama, so I’m probably going to regret making this comment. But about this bug merge request in particular, you have to remember that RHEL’s main target audience is paying enterprise customers. It’s the “E” right there in RHEL. So stability is a high priority for their developers, since if they accidentally introduce a bug to their code, then they’ll have a lot of unhappy paying customers.
The next comment that was cropped out of that screenshot basically explains exactly that. While the Red Hat developers probably appreciate the bug fix, the reality is that the bug was listed as non-critical, and the Red Hat teams didn’t have the capacity to adequately regression test and QA the merge request. But the patch was successfully merged into Fedora, so it will eventually end up in RHEL through that path, which is exactly what the Fedora path is for.
The blowup about this particulat bug doesn’t seem justified to me. Red Hat obviously can’t fix and regression test every single bug that’s listed in their bug tracker. So why arbitrarily focus on this one medium priority bug? if it were listed as a critical bug, then yes, the blowup would be justified.
In its blog post Red Hat specifically called out downstream distributions for not contributing anything to the development of RHEL and that they should be making fixes to CentOS Stream. Well, this is a fix for CentOS Stream and Red Hat still doesn’t care. They just don’t want community contributions.
CentOS Stream is the staging ground for RHEL. It isn’t a bleeding edge distro that can accept any merge request willy-nilly. For the reason why, reread my original comment about the nature of enterprise support.
Fedora is the distro that is more bleeding edge in the RHEL realm. This merge request was more suited for Fedora, and the fix was successfully applied to Fedora. So, I fail to see any irrational actions from Red Hat here.
Sounds to me like they messed up the communication between them and the devs. If they directed the PR submitter to Fedora, I think there wouldn’t be as much fuel to the fire.
Granted, all the chaos surrounding RHEL does make me a little worried for Fedora. Fedora is not a bad distro by any means, and I don’t want to have to not recommend it because of the drama.
The only thing Red Hat has power over Fedora is its name and infrastructure. Red Hat can’t decide for Fedora. Do they have Red Hat employees working for Fedora? Yes, they do, but the employees decide for Fedora, not for Red Hat. Besides, all the telemetry drama is being sorted out in the most open way possible over on Discourse (Fedora Discussion). It is still a 100% community distribution despite a lot of people saying “it is already decided” “Fedora is doomed” etc.
I stopped recommending it. It is a pity, but there are alternatives
Not having resources to test it right this second isn’t “doesn’t care” it’s just a lower priority.
Except that they are not expecting to merge this into RHEL. They are sending it to CentOS Stream.
CentOS Stream is midstream of RHEL and Fedora. That sounds like it’s like a cert type of environment for RHEL. The same logic would apply there. You don’t want to be introducing a bunch of new changes to code once it’s in the cert environment unless they’re critical.
But it is also another stab in the community, they took centos that was a community project for them, then transformed this project that was downstream to upstream, then called all other downstream distros a negative net worth cause they don’t engage in the process of RHEL, then blocked the acess to this distros to the downstream, then reject the work of this ppl they called net negative without a decent process.
What actually red hat wants?
Centos now is only a beta branch? Ppl who wants derive from centos should be fixing everything downstream and duplicate work cause centos now is just an internal beta from red hat? If yes, why they took the project from the community? I’m not a rpm based distros user but I totally understand why ppl are pissed.
I’m making no comment on CentOS being absorbed and repurposed by Red Hat. I’m just saying it makes sense why Red Hat would rather have this fix in Fedora than CentOS Stream.
I’m making no comments about you making or no comments on centOS being repurposed. I’m just saying that this blown-up is probably caused by a mixture of miscommunication between RHEL and a community that feels like being tossed aside, I just said that because you said that you felt unjustified.
I’m getting downvoted on my comment about not making a comment on CentOS, so now I feel obligated to reply to this.
I don’t know, dude. I don’t really care about the miscommunication. I was just focusing solely on the merits of the merge request’s code changes.
For the miscommunication, it seems like a two way street to me. That was GitLab, so the Red Hat dev was probably operating under the assumption that people there already understood everything about their testing process. But obviously that’s not the case, so Red Hat should create better boilerplate responses for these scenarios. But on the other side of the coin, whoever took this screenshot and posted it to reddit or wherever did so prematurely, imo. They should’ve asked around a bit to make sure it was a legitimate thing to blow up about before they sent a lynch mob to the merge request.
I’m still getting downvoted, so I’m just going to put this here and be done with this:
RTFM about DevOps
What actually red hat wants?
All the control and all of the money.
Besides that, I suspect they have no clear vision. And if they do, they are absolutely terrible at communicating that.
That could have been better communicated though. What you said is reasonable, what Michal said isn’t as much.
Fedora is where this sort of thing is supposed to go. That’s been Red Hat philosophy since forever. Patch as high upstream as you can. Sounds like this is a non issue.
Agree on point of detail, but the “drama” is the reason for the fuss. Redhat’s communication, especially to the community that helped build and support it, has always been patchy, but over the past few years it’s been apalling. As others have pointed out, they’ve insulted a lot of us, specifically for not contributing upstream - so it’s not unexpected for them to be called on it when someone does.
I think the EL sphere as a whole (including RHEL and all up and downstreams) is getting drastically weakened directly because of Redhat’s poor decision making, and that’s a shame for all of us.
Maybe you should familiarize yourself with CentOS Stream and its purpose.
Wasn’t Red Hat just complaining that Alma and Rocky didn’t add value because they weren’t submitting fixes upstream?
There goes the narrative. Didn’t last very long, did it?
Its funny how podcasters and commenters seem to have taken Redhat’s spin about “contributing value to the community” seriously, while to the rest of us the whole thing was obviously only about money (same as all the follow-ups from other parties… I would say “including Alma” but that would probably deserve its separate debate).
The point of FOSS is not and has never been that people should “contribute value”, that’s the capitalist rhetoric and christian protestant ethic that’s so ingrained in many that people fall for it.
None of the FOSS licenses contain anything about having to contribute, they’re all about preserving the freedom of the software, and contributions automatically emerge from that concept: having the source available empowers people to solve their problems, and the license ensures that they contribute their solutions, but there is absolutely no requirement nor moral obligation for anyone who takes, uses or redistributes FOSS to make a contribution.
Exactly. “Oracle freeloading” isn’t through some loophole they’re exploiting. It’s the core premise of the license to allow them to do exactly that.
Red Hat saying that argument in-particular shows they’ve pivoted their philosophy significantly, it’s a seemingly subtle change but is huge - presumably due to the IBM acquisition, but maybe due to the pressures in the market right now.
It’s the classic argument against FOSS, which Red Hat themselves have argued against for decades and as an organisation proved that you can build a viable business on the back of FOSS whilst also contributing to it, and that there was indirect value in having others use your work. Only time will tell, but the stage is set for Red Hat to cultivate a different relationship with FOSS and move more into proprietary code.
— “we don’t like people ripping off our work without any added value”
— “Here, let me push this to your staging environment, totally breaking your quality process”
— “No”
— “Well, what the hell do you want broo?”
I don’t think they have ever hidden the fact this is about money. I don’t like the fact this is about money, but the fact that others were cloning and selling their efforts for a cheaper price is awful.
“we don’t like people ripping off our work without any added value”
- “Shouldn’t have based your entire OS on FOSS software then.”
The end.
-
they are not breaking any law. This is totally allowed. You can use FOSS to create a commercial product.
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they are major contributors to the Linux space. And they’ll keep contributing.
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It’s their effort, they created a business around it, and it cycles back to push Linux forward.
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this isn’t even going to affect average users. This is going to take money from companies that probably have the money to pay. For other companies, there are other distributions available.
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Bro, do you even FOSS?
“Your code has an issue here’s a fix for that”.
Corporate: no.
As someone interviewing for Canonical’s Security team (they make you do like 10 interviews, I’m like 5 deep over 3 weeks), I cannot imagine anyone security-minded writing that comment. It either:
- Comes from higher up
- Michal doesn’t think security is important
Can you prove that your joining Canonical (picture proof), as you know, people can be anything in the internet while they’re in their parent’s basement.
If you are, what type of interview questions do they ask?
Are you this obnoxious to people you meet offline?
Vim or emacs?
Nano
M-x butterfly
cat
Micro gang here. There are at least two of us!
represent
Butterflies
Ed is the standard text editor.
He has not joined yet. What is he supposed to prove?
@MrOzwaldMan first you attack someone then want an answer, interesting strategy
I mean sure, here you go. I’m in stage 3 of 4 right now:
Everyone is going to have to accept that RHEL is over and done. Since paying customers are not allow to release the code publicly, overtime it could turn into its own ooerating system that happens to use the Linux kernel, similar to Android.
Forget about Red Hat, they’re gone, they’re not an option for any small company. Individuals should never have been using Red Hat, but companies are going to have to find something else like Debian/Devuan, FreeBSD, something with a stable branch that gets 3 to 4 years of updates.
RHEL ultimately comes from Fedora (plus Redhat has a great say in where Fedora is headed), so… RHEL won’t become sort of an AIX or HPUX anytime soon.
That said, Redhat’s move opens up the position of “enterprise-like distro for scientific/technical shops and other people who do their own support” (think, from CERN to small software houses) that so was the reign of RHEL clones (together with Ubuntu, of course).
Those are people who will probably never buy RHEL licenses for all their machines no matter what, so in a sense it stands to reason that RH doesn’t care about them (if you think their move is about money rather than falling for the “value to the community” PR spin), but those same people are also trend setters whose choices, in time, trickle down to universities and then companies, and to me it looks like there’s a huge opportunity there (and that Alma is currently in the best position to harvest from it in the long run).
Is there a reason that Alma and/or Rocky shouldn’t try to release their own version of SLES and SLED?
Everyone is going to have to accept that RHEL is over and done
Except they’re not. Almost nobody in their customer base (enterprises) is going to care one bit about any of this drama. They’ll have their support contracts and software certified for RHEL and they’ll keep paying Red Hat for the privilege, and RHEL will remain the dominant distribution in the enterprise market.
The danger is that if we stop caring, and let Red Hat have their way, distros like Rocky and Alma will become endangered and access to a free and unencumbered RHEL compatible distribution may eventually be cut off entirely. This would give Red Hat a de facto monopoly and a stranglehold on the enterprise market, and eventually it may even drift so far away from mainstream Linux that due to incompatibilities you just can’t run the same workloads on a Debian system anymore. This would land us right back to the situation where we started in the 1990s, where a select few companies (i.e. IBM, Sun, Microsoft, HP,…) controlled the market with their closed source mutually incompatible operating systems.
Saying things like “forget about Red Hat” is defeatism and running away from a fight that should be fought.
That’s exactly what’s already happened. Rocky and Alma are already no longer an option for a free version of Red Hat since Red Hat code is not allowed to be shared, it can only be viewed. Read their own words from Alma and Rocky, what they themself said about oing forward.
Red Hat can also change the license agreement further to include anyone proven to have published source code of Red Hat branded material agrees to pay a fee to Red Hat of no less than $10 million, or whatever price they want to put on it.
Everyone can scream about Red Hat, all they have to have to do is change some wording in agreement that includes fees(fines) for multi millions of dollars, BOOM! Red Hat becomes a proprietary system built on open source software.
SUSE says they will fork RHEL, but Alma and Rocky are over in terms of being a clone. People have asked for years why there is no free 1 to 1 clone of SLES and SLED. IBM is free to choose to turn all of RHEL in a proprietary development and lock it down, unless you can get a court order that says Red Hate’s code must be made public, but I don’t dare test IBM lawyers over any code that is not released under AGPLv3, only then I would.
Red Hat can also change the license agreement
It’s not a license agreement, it’s a terms of service agreement. The license of the software is still the GPL (or any of the other FOSS licenses that apply).
all they have to have to do is change some wording in agreement that includes fees(fines) for multi millions of dollars
The point where they introduce punitive terms to the terms of service agreement in response to redistribution, is also the point where their argument that “they’re free to choose who they do business with” breaks down because they’re no longer just ending their business relationship with you, they’re imposing a punishment. They wouldn’t just be skirting the GPL, they would be blatantly violating it.
I would love to see IBM lawyers try to get that fee enforced when a customer exercises their GPL granted freedom to distribute a piece of software that Red Hat didn’t create and own to begin with.
The GNU/Linux GPLv2 does not apply to any software developed and owned by Red Hat like all of the Red Hat security programs, that is not covered by the Linux license. If Red Hat never modifies or changes a single line of code in GNU/Linux, they are free to run closed source programs on top of it. They own .rpm file format so they have the legal freedom to make the system and all RH software proprietary.
That’s how Rocky and Alma are now permanently locked out from accessing the code.
Why do people care about RHEL? Is it really any better than Debian based stuff?
I really don’t care about RHEL. Unless companies want to buy their services to be allowed access to the software it, everyone should forget about Red Hat. It’s done, it’s gone. And there will never be a free version of Red Hat, so look at other long term alternatives.
It checked a lot of boxes for corporation use. SELinux isn’t/wasn’t on debian either. But it’s not any ‘better’. Debian has been rock solid for me. ZFS is the only thing I’d like to see in Debian feature-wise.
It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for them.
It still requires a substantial amount of time to review the fix. Depending on the circumstances it might require more time to review a piece of code than to write it.
For large scale patches: definitely. It’s often easier for a project to let its own experts write their own 100 line patch than it is to review someone else’s 100 line patch.
In this instance: it’s a changelog entry and a patch to a C file (8 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)). Remove the printed warning and you’re back to 5 insertions. Furthermore, the patch has already been merged upstream.
Redhat is free to choose what patches they do and do not accept and the low quality Reddit outrage posts in the Gitlab issue sure doesn’t make things any better, but this is quite a silly thing to refuse to merge.
Debian posted fixes for this at about the same time this fix was proposed.
Maybe I just don’t get it, but how does this work in any way that doesn’t make them liable for some company being exploited by something that they were aware could’ve been prevented?
This makes me much more upset than Red Hat asking people to rebase on CentOS Stream.
This is ridiculous.
Alright, at first I was like okay red hat wants to make money to keep IBM happy. Now I just realize it’s not read hat anymore. Fuck that I’m moving to suse
Nobody was ever not ok with Red Hat making money. What we’re not ok with is Red Hat trying to make even more money at the expense of software freedom.
wow
“You code has an issue, here is a fix for that issue ready to be used.”
Corporate: no.
Alma should use this as advantage for them. Now market it as “Alma Linux is more secure than RHEL”.
And this is why I use Ubuntu server.
iperf3 is in the universe repo on Ubuntu, so don’t expect Canonical to spend too much effort patching it unless you’re an Ubuntu Pro subscriber.
The last change to iperf3 on Ubuntu (jammy) is listed as being posted on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 16:36:01 +0100. Chances are you’ll never get the patch unless you install a separate iperf3 repository from someone who does include patches.
